56 Comments

Love the podcast and website and I am devout fan/follower of this information chain. However your discussion on the removable battery driving me nuts. Your not the only ones either ! As a person that carries both the EVO LTE and the Galaxy S3 on a daily basis I will have to share with you my experience. It is really pretty simple I can not use the HTC Evo 4g LTE and get through a day no matter what ! The main reason is because I listen to podcast all day at work and in my job I am moving around quite a bit getting tools and other things for what ever project I am working on. This means that I would have to have an external charger in my pocket with the wire running to my phone to keep it going ! Obviously this is a less than ideal situation and the reason I use my Galaxy S3 for this use case. It is because of this that I am torn between the nice features and beautiful build of the HTC One and the function of the Galaxy S4. I love the Super LCD Screens but the Super amoled is no slouch. The main thing that I favor in the Evo's screen the most is the brightness of it and I know that the Ones screen will also maintain this attribute. I suppose I could just keep using my S3 for the podcast but the device I use for this ends up being my most used device even for other smart phone tasks. Meaning that I would be using my old phone for my main phone and that does not make much sense I suppose. Guess i could get the One for it's camera attributes considering I do a lot of macro shots for work. I just wish HTC could make the phone last all day no matter what the usage scenario ! In the end I guess it is not bad problem to have and I wiould probably be happy either way. I just wanted to point out there are use cases where a removable battery is essential ! Reply

I totally agree with you... while external storage can be dismissed as being unreliable, and replaceable batteries being deemed unnecessary, at least Samsung is giving us a choice! Since when do we want to limit our choices?The argument they made in the podcast against external storage was that the medium was slow and unreliable... but it is obvious that you need to have backups of your pictures and data no matter where it is currently stored.... I don't think the camera storage space is why people want SD cards for their phones; they want it to store music and videos to watch when they aren't connected or on the road, or just don't want to max out their data plans streaming netflix/hulu at subpar streaming quality... If my sd card on my phone were to break, I wouldn't care, because it just has temporary information that I want to consume, nobody is or should be treating their phone's microsdhc card as a data vault for critical information.To counter the point of the shooting a wedding and losing the photos, if you had a microsd slot on the card, you could store the photos on the phone's main storage, and make a copy onto the microsd card and have redundant data in case of accidental deletion, phone failure, etc... I understand why google doesn't want us to have these options (force us into cloud storage/services), but for all the naysayers of removable batteries and removable storage; whats the down side? Why not have options? The galaxy series of phones has proven you can have these things without negatively affecting the dimensions or weight of the phone. Despite having these features, the GS4 is a much smaller and lighter device than the HTC One, I really don't get all the hate for having options, especially when having those options has virtually no down side and many benefits.Reply

But there is a downside - you add more parts that can break or become loose, and you have to compromise on the design. Perhaps that is less important to some than a removable battery or SD card, but I would argue that equally many people consider that trade-off not worth it, and many more who simply don't care either way. In my personal use case, I never bothered to upgrade it - I always just used the 8GB card that came with the phone, and I never pulled the battery unless I was changing SIMs or flashing ROMs. My current phone has 16GB, non-expandable, and I don't find myself wanting for space at all, so 32 or 64 would be more than enough - and I consider myself a bit of a "power user". So for the "hoi polloi" (love that line, BTW), I doubt it really makes much of a difference - in fact, it could be argued that having more moving/removable parts leaves more to go wrong for the average user who didn't ask for, want, need, or even know about such things.

As for the removable battery, there is a mitigation for this. You can buy a ~10,000 mAh USB battery pack for $40 or so, and it'll charge something like a One four times over while being about the same size and weight as 4 spare batteries. Plus, you don't have to turn your phone off and on and do a battery pull, and you can share it with other people if they need a top-up.Reply

You have to compromise on the design to do build any type of mobile phone, balancing features is especially important in the mobile space since we are now fitting SO MUCH technology into one device... I'm not saying I want ALL phones to have removable batteries and external storage, I am quite happy with a variety of options, and think there is definitely a place for phones like the ONE that by design need to have a non-user serviceable battery. But my point is...if a phone DOES have these features, people shouldn't turn their noses up at it just because their favorite phone happens to not have removable storage or removable battery.

And lets be honest, how many people are breaking their microsd slots and suffering from failing flash memory? (queue sarcasm)I'm hearing the argument that nobody uses these slots anyways, so how could they possibly be breaking if they aren't used? and if they did break, would it matter? or how would anyone notice?, since they arent using the slots anyway right?(end sarcasm)Its happened to me maybe once 10 years ago on a compact flash card. Ive never had an issue with any SD card in any of its mini and micro flavors. Granted, I do shop for brand name items rather than bottom of the barrel flash memory.

My bottom line is, lets not put a phone down for giving us the option of removing the battery and adding storage, since you are not required to use those features, its just an add on capability. Likewise, people should realize that phones that don't have external storage or removable batteries are still attractive to the majority of the market and their are plenty of people who have no need for those features. However, I would personally argue that there is a substantial market who will vote with their wallets in favor of a device that does have these features.Reply

But I don't think that anyone is putting down the GS4 *because* it has a removable battery and SD slot. All they are saying that it isn't really worth getting as riled up as some people on the interwebs have been. Reply

I suppose you did not read my use case scenario about having a removable battery on page 3. You should consider that not everyone is sitting at a desk or in a situation where they can tether a external battery to there phone. This is because some people have to remain mobile which makes the use of the external battery a cumbersome situation. As far as storage goes I have never had an issue with the storage bay not working on a device. I use the external sd to store backups, pictures, videos and music and I make back ups to dropbox and my computer just in case. To each his own and everyone has different use cases but I personally enjoy having a removable 32g micro sd card and removable battery. I use the internal nand for things that I feel need the extra speed and there is nothing like being able to put a new battery in and not having to worrying about your phone being low on juice ever.Reply

Removable/replaceable battery: Not everyone tosses their phone away after a year for the next shiny thing....and it looks like in terms of display, battery life, and features (do we need more than 802.11ac?) the hardware is maturing out. So, there will less of a drive to toss the phone after a year or two...especially if the US carriers move more toward the T-Mobile style of separating the phone from the service. That said, wouldn't it be useful 2 years down the road to replace the battery that no longer holds a decent charge? I loved the HTC One review. Seems to be a great phone. But, will HTC provide a service to replace the battery down the road?

No, you are not. Once I figured out that Neutron can play ALAC, I simply copy my complete music library from iTunes to ma phone (GN2). While only one thousand of songs, it takes more than 32GB. Then shooting videos and photos (which are not that important that I cannot lose them) take some more, and finally putting few 720p h.264 movies before business trip makes basically my 64GB SD card full. I do not touch it with apps though. But calling it a disadvantage seems to be quite overstatement. You may claim it is disadvantage for manufacturer, but for me it was actually decision point for why go with Sammy and not Nexus 4 (or whatever Google) or HTC.

For the replaceable battery I do not care as much (as long as it replaceable somehow), but there are some situations where removing the battery is very useful (like completely powering off the phone).Reply